And his 50th birthday bash, held in 1997, featured acts such as The Cure’s Robert Smith, Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan and Foo Fighters.

I liked this album back then!

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And so Bowie in the ’90s approached his legacy by modernizing it — and, in some cases, trying to one up it. That led to one of his most underrated studio albums, “Earthling,” which turns 20 years old on Feb. 3. Co-produced by Bowie, Reeves Gabrels and Mark Plati, the bracing LP incorporates the serrated drum ‘n’ bass and electronic textures dominating music in the 1990s.

Two “Earthling” highlights, “Little Wonder” and “Battle for Britain (The Letter),” boast skittering drums that careen like a pinball machine, as well as industrial-flavored guitar aggression. The latter song also possesses sliced-and-diced, mad-genius piano. Distorted vocal effects and club-worthy programming — as on the stomping, dystopian Day-Glo highlight “Dead Man Walking” and the 8-bit-synthrock hellmouth “The Last Thing You Should Do” — further smear the lines between the organic and synthetic.

“I wanted to go whole-hog and do a real combination of hard rock and jungle, and I think that two or three times on the album, we come really close to it,” Bowie told Pulse in 1997. “‘Little Wonder’ is a really good song and ‘Battle for Britain’ is a really extraordinary piece of music,” he said.